1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to medical devices, and more specifically to calibrating devices employed in a medical or operating room setting, such as footswitches or footpedals.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's safety critical systems, such as automated medical system products or surgical equipment, may be constructed as a collection of independent components realized in hardware and software. Constructing a suite of independent components or modules affords medical system product designers and manufacturers the ability to create and deploy subsystems that perform specific functions that are a subset of the complete device or system.
One such subsystem is that of a footswitch or footpedal, employed in certain medical environments, such as an operating room theater, in conjunction with a medical procedure such as a phacoemulsification (“phaco”) surgical procedure. The footswitch is frequently employed to control phaco functionality, including but not limited to amount of power provided by the phaco needle, fluid flow aspects, and so forth.
Certain newer footswitches are dual-axis or dual linear footswitches, providing the user with two axes of control, commonly called the pitch axis and the yaw axis. A surgeon or operator can control one or more parameters in the pitch axis and one or more parameters in the yaw axis, so pushing down on the footswitch may provide a different function from moving one's foot to one side. Other inputs may be provided, such as buttons that can be depressed by the surgeon's foot, typically positioned away from the pedal or at the base of the pedal. A dual linear footswitch comprises a pitch axis and yaw axis and may provide a linear response, a panel response, a switch response, or any other response known in the art.
Overall system integrity is paramount to designing and deploying safety critical systems. Today's designers are faced with a difficult and complex implementation challenge to ensure a high level of performance in subsystems such as a footswitch in order to provide the required level of safety in an operating theater environment.
One issue that occurs with footswitches is falling out of alignment, or losing calibration. Electro-mechanical misalignment results from aging electronic components or dislocation of mechanical devices. Once a footswitch goes “out of alignment,” which is generally a subjective determination, the footswitch is typically removed from service and repaired. Time away from the operating room environment is undesirable for any non-consumable medical device, such as a footswitch.
Based on the foregoing, it would be advantageous to provide a footswitch that has minimal or no downtime in most situations, or in other words a footswitch that overcomes the foregoing drawbacks present in previously known footswitches or similar medical devices.